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Anne Frank's stepsister overcame her hate

Eva Schloss, who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during the Holocaust, will speak at the Venice Community Center on March 18, 2013. Schloss' mother, the only other survivor in her family, later married Otto Frank, widower and father to the famous diarist Anne Frank.

Published: Friday, March 15, 2013 at 2:46 p.m.

Last Modified: Friday, March 15, 2013 at 2:46 p.m.

Eva Schloss, who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during the Holocaust, will speak at the Venice Community Center on March 18, 2013. Schloss' mother, the only other survivor in her family, later married Otto Frank, widower and father to the famous diarist Anne Frank.

STAFF PHOTO / ELAINE LITHERLAND

Facts

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WHAT: Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss will talk about her experiences and her stepsister, Anne Frank.

• July 6, 1941 - Heinz Geiringer, Eva's older brother, receives a notice that he is to be deported to a labor camp in Germany. Instead, the family decides to go into hiding.

• July 1941-May 1942 — The Geiringers spend nearly two years hiding in the homes of members of the Dutch Resistance, with Eva and her mother separated from her father and brother.

• May 11, 1944 — SS troopers raid the home where Eva and her mother are hiding and arrest them. Later that month, the Geiringers are put with other Jewish prisoners on cattle cars for a train ride to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in Poland.

• January 1945 — Eva, her mother and other prisoners wake to discover the guards and dogs gone. Within days, Russian soldiers arrive. Soon, the survivors will be taken by train to safety in Russia.

• May 7, 1945 — Germany surrenders unconditionally.

• May 1945 — Eva and her mother are repatriated to Amsterdam.

• August 8, 1945 — Eva and her mother receive a letter from the Red Cross informing them that Erich and Heinz Geiringer died in a concentration camp in Austria.

• 1951 — Eva Geiringer moves to London and becomes a professional photographer.

• 1952 — Eva Geiringer marries Zvi Schloss, an economics student from Israel. They will have three daughters and five grandchildren.

• November 10, 1953 — Fritzi Geiringer, Eva's mother, and Otto Frank marry. Their mutual life mission becomes the global publication of “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.” Fifty-three years after her release from Birkenau, she will die at age 93. He will die at age 91.

• 1988 — Schloss publishes her autobiography, “Eva's Story,” and becomes a writer and public speaker.

Eva Schloss hated the Germans who invaded her homeland, Austria, and forced her Jewish family to flee for their lives.

She hated the Austrians for not resisting the Nazis.

She hated those Dutch who pretended to assist the Resistance but, for money, betrayed Jewish refugees — including her family — by exposing their hiding places to the dreaded SS.

She hated the Polish overseers and German guards who treated her and other prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps as “animals.”

She overcame that all-consuming hate because of the constant encouragement of her stepfather — a man who had lost his entire family in the concentration camps, the father of her childhood friend, the posthumously published diarist Anne Frank.

“Otto Frank, he who had lost everybody, had no hate,” Schloss said. “That, to me, was amazing. He helped me a lot.”

On Monday, Schloss — the last survivor of the Holocaust personally connected to the Anne Frank legacy — will share her life-changing experiences with an audience in Venice.

Originally published in Holland in 1947, “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” continues to be a global bestseller and an introduction for later generations to the Jewish plight in World War II.

Because it describes the Frank family's time in hiding but not the horrors that followed, “it is not a Holocaust book,” Schloss said.

That is why, at 83, Schloss — whose autobiography, “Eva's Story,” made her a renowned spokeswoman for Holocaust survivors — remains committed to the lecture circuit.

For the past two decades, she has toured Europe, Australia and the United States speaking at schools, theaters, churches, libraries — even prisons — to make sure younger generations know about the Holocaust and share her commitment that such atrocities must never happen again.

Just days before Passover, the commemoration of the Israelites' freedom from slavery in Egypt, Schloss will share her story with a crowd that includes 600 middle and high school students — many of them of the age Schloss was when she spent two years in hiding and nine months in the Birkenau concentration camp.

Schloss, who lives in London, has been in Sarasota with her husband, visiting friends. But she embraces the chance to tell her story to perhaps the last generation who will ever it hear it from someone who was there.

“I want to tell them to accept each other, that there should not be prejudice because of color, religion, looks,” Schloss said. “I want them to learn from history.”

Her tale is one of startling contrasts, of acts of harrowing horror and despicable cruelty as well as feats of inspiring kindness and incredible self-sacrifice.

It is a lesson about the human condition that applies to every generation, about the choices between good and evil that we all make as individuals and the underlying truth that life is fragile and precious.

Vienna to Amsterdam

Eva Geiringer was born into a loving family. She adored her father, Erich, whom she called “Pappy;” her mother, Fritzi, whom she called “Mutti;” and her older and multi-talented brother, Heinz.

They were a typical Jewish family in the culturally rich city of Vienna.

In the 1930s, however, Jewish families in Austria were keenly aware of the anti-Semetic feelings brewing in neighboring Nazi Germany.

On March 12, 1938, their lives would be forever changed as the Nazis invaded Austria — encountering not just no resistance but jubilant crowds.

Friends of the Geiringers suddenly became openly hostile.

Like many Jewish households, the Geiringers fled. By that May, Erich Geiringer had relocated his shoe factory to Holland and sent for the rest of his family.

They settled in a Jewish neighborhood of apartment buildings in Amsterdam.

Eva would get to know a girl of her age whose family lived in the building across the street: smart, pretty Anne Frank.

The Franks had emigrated from Germany when Anne was 4. Unlike Eva, Anne was fully assimilated in her new homeland.

“She felt Dutch,” Schloss remembered. “She didn't speak German at all any more.”

While Eva considered herself “a tomboy,” Anne already had a keen interest in fashion and boys. “She was more mature than I.”

On May 10, 1940, the Geiringers' lives, as those of the Franks and all Jewish families, were again in upheaval as the Nazis invaded Holland.

The Geiringers hoped to board a ship bound for England but arrived at the port too late.

The Nazis imposed strict curfews and rules on the Jewish populace, which was required to wear the Star of David on their clothing.

When Heinz got a notice that he was to be deported to a German labor camp, the Geiringers — as did many Jewish families — sought the help of the Dutch Resistance and went into hiding.

Behind false walls

Eva presumed other Jewish families, such as the Franks, might be doing the same but did not know for sure.

“You didn't talk about it,” Schloss said. “You just disappeared.”

Eva and her mother had to be separated from her father and brother because the Resistance could not arrange hiding places that could conceal all four of them.

Eva, who longed for the outdoors, remained in small, hidden rooms in Resistance members' homes.

“My father thought we would be in hiding for a couple of weeks, a couple of months — at most,” Schloss said.

The family remained in hiding two years.

They frequently changed locations because their hosts would either demand more money or become fearful their treason might be discovered by the Nazis.

The Nazis knew Heinz had not reported for deportation and soon realized his family was missing as well.

“They were looking for us.”

Frequently, SS troopers stormed the homes where Eva and her mother remained silent and motionless just inches away behind false walls.

Eva and her mother would take the risk of visiting her father and brother, daring to walk the streets without wearing the Star of David.

“Being separated, being scared that one part of our family might be taken, we just needed to do it,” Schloss said. She and her mother wanted confirmation that Erich and Heinz had not been captured.

Because she and her mother were fair haired, they were never stopped and required to show their falsified identity papers. “We both looked very Dutch.”

On Eva's 15th birthday, her life would take its next devastating turn.

Capture and torment

A Dutch nurse who pretended to assist the Resistance knew of the Geiringers' hiding places and, for money, betrayed them.

As Eva and her host family were having breakfast, just as that family's son gave her a birthday gift she never got to unwrap or see what it was, the SS burst in.

The Gestapo fiercely interrogated them and Jews discovered in other raids separately, threatening to torture their relatives if they were not truthful. Despite being repeatedly hit with a truncheon, Eva tried not to tell her captors anything they did not already know — especially information that could put members of the Resistance at risk.

The family briefly remained together at a Dutch prison camp. Within days, they and other detainees were herded onto cattle cars with no space to sit.

For days, the train ventured across Europe, the crowded cattle cars reeking of excrement.

At their destination in Poland, German guards with dogs and guns ordered them to stand in long lines to await further interrogation. While her father and brother were sent to nearby Auschwitz, Eva and her mother were confined to the Birkenau concentration camp.

Auschwitz-Birkenau “was a huge, huge complex, every part separated by electrified barbed wire.”

Their heads were shaved and what was left of their clothes and possessions removed.

They slept in wooden bunks without mattresses or blankets, their only warmth being each other's bodies — as lice and blood-sucking bedbugs relentlessly tormented them.

They got what nourishment they could from the scraps that served as their meals, eating whatever they could out of chipped mugs that they protected as valued possessions — no longer allowed to dine like civilized beings. Every day, starvation threatened.

“You could hardly ever wash. You scratched yourself with dirty fingernails. The water was not clean. You very often got typhus, dysentery, cholera.”

Every time they were ordered into the showers, they worried they were about to be exposed to deadly gas rather than cold water. Guards laughingly taunted them with stories of the crematoriums.

“They were so cruel to us because they didn't consider us humans. To them, we were like rats, vermin. The Germans showed no kindness.”

From before dawn to after sunset, they were subjected to sudden beatings and assigned to work details.

When they were not doing hard labor, Eva and her mother were assigned the task of going through the mounds of clothing stripped from prisoners, most of them already gassed. They cut into the linings to find jewelry or anything else of value the condemned had attempted to hide and forfeited it to their captors. Eva would become overcome with emotion whenever she would uncover someone's family photos.

On several occasions, while on her work detail, she could see her father through a barbed-wire fence and visit with him briefly — getting assurances that Heinz remained alive as well.

Grateful that she and her 39-year-old mother were at least still together, Eva thought for sure Mutti was doomed when the notorious “Dr. Death,” Josef Mengele, “selected” her for one of his torturous experiments.

Her mother's cousin, a Jewish nurse in the camp hospital, somehow convinced Mengele to release her and mother and daughter were reunited.

“I can only call it a miracle,” Schloss said.

Throughout her ordeal, Schloss did not forsake hope that, someday, the Allies would rescue them.

“I was 15. I didn't want to die. I wanted to experience life, have a boyfriend, get married, have a family.”

The bear at the gate

By December, distant gunfire and cannon fire gave the prisoners hope that the Russians were advancing. Yet it also caused them to worry that the Germans might try to destroy all evidence of the concentration camps before retreating.

Many of the prisoners were marched away to other camps.

Lying in their bunk, Eva and her mother fantasized about their lives if they were freed: “warm baths with soap, sleeping between clean sheets, eating with a knife and fork . . .”

And the food, oh, they could just taste the food — fresh bread with butter, crunchy apples, roast chicken, pancakes, chocolate pudding, all washed down with glasses of milk.

On a January morning, Eva, her mother and a couple of hundred other prisoners woke to discover the guards and dogs gone.

Over the next several days, many of the prisoners who were gravely ill died. Eva performed “the worst task” of her life, carrying out the corpses.

Even so, the survivors found an abundance of food in the kitchen, warmer clothes and assorted tools. Just as Eva, her mother and two other women moved into a house just outside the camp where SS officers had stayed, they heard another woman outside scream, “There's a bear at the gate!”

The bear turned out to be a fur-capped Russian soldier. Eventually, he would be followed by his comrades.

To this day, Schloss has only praise for her Russian liberators. “They treated us with respect. They fed us, clothed us, brought us back to safety. They could have abandoned us. They were still pursuing the Nazis and in the middle of fighting.”

When she deemed it safe enough, Eva walked to Auschwitz to search for her father and brother.

There she discovered Otto Frank, whose wife had died and whose daughters had been taken elsewhere. Later, another acquaintance there delivered the bad news that Eva's father and brother were ordered on one of the last forced marches to leave Auschwitz.

Eventually, the camp survivors boarded a train again — this time heading into Russia and farther away from the front lines.

‘I'm a lucky person'

After Eva and her mother resettled in Holland, they received devastating news from the Red Cross.

Eva's father and brother died at the Mauthausen camp in Austria, Heinz of exhaustion and her father of causes that are still unknown.

On the train trip to Auschwitz, Heinz had confided that he had concealed his paintings under the floorboards of his last hiding place. Eva and her mother recovered the artwork.

Otto Frank became a frequent visitor in the Geiringer home.

He learned that his daughters Anne and Margot were taken to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany, where they died of typhus.

When the woman who hid the Frank family gave him Anne's diary, he felt reconnected with his daughter.

He and Fritzi Geiringer, who barely knew each other prior to the war, married and made the global publication of the diary and correspondence with its readers their life mission.

“He loved my mother very much. Anne was really part of our family, as a spirit. He talked about her continuously.”

Eva Geiringer would become Eva Schloss, have three daughters and five grandchildren. After the 1988 publication of her autobiography, she assumed a new role as a public figure on the worldwide lecture circuit — educating others about the Holocaust.

She refuses to see any heroism in her personal story. “I don't consider me a hero. I'm a lucky person. I certainly did not do it out of heroism. Heroes risk their life to save people. The people in the Resistance were the heroes. They could have taken the easy way out and just been bystanders. That was free will and those were heroes.”

During the Holocaust, she lost her faith in God. “Why did God not interfere? Why did God let this happen?” she asked herself.

Years later, with the help of Otto Frank, she learned to accept the past and, instead of being bitter about the world, to try and make it a better place. She regained her faith in God and what she considered God's gift of “free will.”

“God gave us a choice in how to live and it is up to use to choose between good and evil,” Schloss decided.

The story of Eva Schloss is about more than good and evil, though. It is a character study in perseverance, the struggle and will to live even in the shadow of death — even for those who think God has forsaken them.

“Life is too precious to give up easily.”

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” — Anne Frank

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